Many of my forum members have their own websites, so I was thinking of encouraging them to link to the forum by offering some kind of "award", like a little graphic under their avatar that links to their web page. (As opposed to just a graphical link to whatever page the members put in their profile... I envision this would be something I'd approve on an individual basis, and possibly spider the page periodically to check that the link is still there.)

I'm still considering changing to a different software package, so I was wondering if there are any CMS/forums that already has a plugin/module that does something like this. Failing that, how hard is it to get a custom plugin written?

Michelle

I'm a little bit confused, but are you referring to the space underneath their usernames for each post? If so, there kind of sort of is a way to do this, at least for vBulletin. If you'll take note of our donators here at AF - They have a special image that says "Supporters" underneath their names...All that is is a User Title written in html code. I'm not sure if it is possible (as I've never done it before), but what you might could do, at least with vBulletin, is to allow your members to alter their own title. Make them an image and let them use that image as their title and link it to their page. Now, this is obviously a round-a-bout way to do it...you might not want to give members the ability to edit their own title - So you could always do it by request manually...or perhaps your solution is to request a custom plugin for it.

To answer your question shortly...I don't know of any software or mod that will do this, but there is a round-a-bout way of doing it.

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...some super-sweet signature

Under my username it has it. Anyway, another thing that you could do to link to their websites, is have a random website showing at the front page of the forums. This would help them post it and would get the a free link. Because a title under their name linking to their site is much like having it in the signature.

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Well I thought it was cool